I drove past the Tootsie Roll factory on Cicero Avenue in Chicago the other day by Midway Airport, and it reminded me of possibly the strangest thing I know of in dividend investing. Every March, Tootsie Roll (TR) hands every single shareholder 3% more shares. Own 100, you wake up with 103. They've been doing it for decades. They call it a stock dividend. Your broker will show it as a 103-for-100 split. And that's exactly how it behaves. The day before: 100 shares at $38.89 is $3,889. The day...
7 days ago • 5 min read
17 days after selling McDonald's (MCD), I bought it back. But not because I'm lovin' the food… I first started buying MCD during the COVID crash in our taxable "overflow" account, at as low as $132, and ended up with 11 shares at a cost basis in the mid-$180s. SimplySafeDividends.com Then our 20-year-old roof took storm damage, and we needed a new one, so we sold all of our McDonald's at $279 to help pay. But what surprised me most was that I missed owning it! This past Friday, I was working...
14 days ago • 7 min read
YouTube is full of "buy these 5 cheap stocks NOW" videos because they're easy to make. But few of those creators are actually buying those stocks—and even fewer list every pick and track it in public, forever. I do. Every pick, tracked from the day the video dropped. No deleting the losers and no cherry-picking. Stock Pick Tracker Spreadsheet Check out the stock pick tracker spreadsheet. Five years and 266 picks later, the sheet has taught me some things I didn't expect: 1. I'm wrong more...
21 days ago • 4 min read
Last week I told you Watsco (WSO) pays out 67% of its free cash flow and called it "comfortably boring." Welp, fellow YouTuber and community member Kevin Burgess, who is a retired CPA, schooled me, and I want to share that with you. First and most importantly, Watsco doesn't own everything on its own financial statements... They run six joint ventures with Carrier — the company that makes most of the equipment they sell. Watsco owns 80% of five of them, 60% of the Canadian one. Carrier owns...
28 days ago • 4 min read
Watsco (WSO) has printed new shares every single year for a decade. Not most years. Every. single. Year. 32.6 million shares in 2016. 38.0 million today. Share dilution is one of my bugaboos. Every new share carves a little off my slice. So when I saw that chart, it was a tougher pill to swallow. But swallow I did and started a position this week, and here's why: A rising share count is kind of like a check engine light. Nine times out of ten, it means something is actually wrong under the...
about 1 month ago • 6 min read
Papa John's (PZZA) was yielding over 6% and that dividend looked shiny and tempting. I'm not going to pretend I didn't notice. It's been sitting on the fringes of my radar for a couple years now, price sliding, yield climbing and my daughter loves their pizza. (Reminder: liking the product doesn't make it a good investment. Plenty of us loved Blockbuster Video too.) Being attracted to a fat yield is fine. Normal, even. A largemouth bass sees something shiny and thinks food. The bass just...
about 1 month ago • 4 min read
So I'm listening to the VICI Properties (VICI) earnings call last week and an analyst asks about buybacks. The stock's been crushed, sitting near its 52-week low. So why not buy some of it back? The CFO basically said no thanks. And the reason he gave is something I don't think most people know, so let me try to explain it, because I've seen social media posts ripping REITs for "diluting shareholders" and there might be some confusion. A REIT (Real Estate Investment Trust) is just a publicly...
about 2 months ago • 5 min read
My international allocation is 0.62%, but the pros say 30% to 40% and I might be making another move to start bringing that higher. For years my excuse was that I owned PepsiCo (PEP) and Johnson & Johnson (JNJ), so I already had foreign exposure. That's half right. A company like PepsiCo gives you global sales, but not global stock behavior. PepsiCo still trades like a US stock no matter where it sells its soda. And the excuse is getting weaker: Goldman Sachs says 28% of S&P 500 revenue came...
about 2 months ago • 5 min read
Here's your weekly helping of interesting investing information and insights. It's embarrassing to admit this, but if it helps one person, it'll be worth it. On 1/1/2025, my employer started offering a Health Savings Account, and we enrolled. If you're not familiar, an HSA is like a retirement account on steroids because it's triple-tax advantaged: you contribute pre-tax dollars, invest them and let them compound, then spend them tax-free on qualified medical expenses. But here's the REALLY...
2 months ago • 3 min read